The first SD cards with storage capacities of 1.5 TB started shipping last year, but Western Digital has announced plans to launch cards with more than twice as much storage.
During the NAB show this week, the company has announced several new SanDisk-branded storage products set to hit the streets in the next year or two, including the world’s first 4TB SD cards, which are expected to launch in 2025.
The upcoming SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC UHS-I card packs 4TB of storage into a card about the size of a postage stamp.
As a UHS-I Class 10 card, it should offer data transfer speeds up to 104MB/S, although AnandTech notes that it’s possible that it’s likely the cards could actually support higher speeds (up to 170MB/s), even though that’s not mentioned in the press release
While the SDUC (Secure Digital Ultra Capacity) standard theoretically supports cards with p to 128GB of storage, this 4TB card is the highest capacity SD card announced to date, and the first I’m aware of to have more than 2TB of storage.
Other new SanDisk products announced during NAB 2024 include:
- 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I card
- 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro microSDXC UHS-I card
- 128GB and 256GB Sandisk SD Express cards
- 128GB and 256GB SanDisk microSD Express cards
The SD Express and microSD Express cards may have just a small fraction of the storage capacity of the Extreme Pro-branded cards. But they’ll offer much higher speeds by utilizing the SD Express standard:Â Western Digital says to expect speeds as much as 4.4 times higher than its other SD cards.
Western Digital isn’t the only company with SD Express cards on the way. Earlier this year Samsung unveiled its first microSD Express cards with support for 800MB/s sequential read speeds.
SD Express technology brings PCI Express and NVMe interfaces to SD cards, enabling support for SSD-like speeds on removable media including SD and microSD cards.
As others have said, I’d prefer improved sequential and random IO performance more than capacity.
I hope there’s more focus on SD Express cards and readers by more manufacturers and, thus, bring down prices for these types of cards/readers. I barely see any UHS-II cards/readers (not sure if UHS-III exists in the wild) so, hopefully, they just jump to SD Express.
I really hope more companies target the SD Express standard more than increasing storage space. I’m going to assume the Samsung SD Express card is going to be expensive given it’s the only one (at least based on this article).
There’s too much of a gap between the storage and speed of SD cards. It’s so large, I don’t even bother getting >512GB cards.
I wish they would make ones that won’t die after a year or two instead.
I have 0 SD cards that have died. I still have 10+ year old micro-SD cards I use for various live Linux OS’s for debugging issues.
Although, the main reason I’d opt to use a newer card for these one-off Linux bootables is that the newer ones are bit faster. I say a bit because random I/O performance which is important for an OS improved even less than sequential speeds which are already slow compared to the size.
I have a number of 1 and 8Gb cards that still alive, too. But 256 and 512Gb ones become unreadable (mostly Samsung), even though they were stored in cases. 2 failed in the phones. Maybe my readers are not good though, I usually use USB3 adapter with card slot and HDMI.
4TB of storage in a object the size of a large thumbnail. Amazing stuff. It’s been a while since I’ve purchased a computer/phone that uses a full SD card, microSD seems to be standard, for the things that cause me to open my wallet. I’ve got a couple of 1TB microSD cards, and they are handy, but have never seen the 1.5TB microSD cards at a price that motivated me to buy one. I’m interested to see how much they will be asking for, for this new tech.
I also wonder how well these cards will deal with big transfers and the heat that they cause.
Would we be able to use the 4+ TB cards in phones and DMP devices with SD and microSD slots right away once they’re available? Or are there limits in the OS that would prevent compatibility?
If the devices already support large cards, then generally you will be able to use cards of any size. There are a few variables that affect it, but most devices can handle it if you do it right.
The usual cause for a card not to be supported is a device without support for the EXFAT filesystem that’s applied to large cards. That’s not the case for nearly any phone used today, but more common for cheaper devices. Reformatting it with FAT32 will usually work, but a 4 TB card is large enough that this might prove difficult.
I’d rather have SD card and reader manufacturers implement the faster speeds of the SD standard at this point. The current speeds of cards are way too slow.
This. The thought of having to fill this up at those (max) speeds… just not worth it. Love the size but speed limits make these things useless.
Uh the use case for most people is downloading/saving, not copying 4TB back and forth. So no, not “worthless”.
That is insane, how is this possible? I doubt this will be cheap.
Perhaps they have developed a super thin circuit board and can stack two 2TB boards on top of each other inside the SD card case? Just a guess.